Up From Orchard Street (2 page)

In theory, Manya admitted three people at a time to select one of the pots that she pulled from the oven on a huge plank. In fact, the aggressive ones jumped the line, pushed and shoved, and amid the shouts and curses, pot covers flew, ingredients spilled and Manya’s flyswatter went into action in an attempt to maintain order.

If she was tired when she entered the bakery under a cloak of darkness, she left with no energy at all after cleaning the mess on the floor and on the basement steps. She tucked her white hair under a shawl large enough to conceal most of her face, claimed her own pot of cholent and stumbled to her building and up the four flights of stairs. There she tore off her shawl, and in the Sabbath silence went to bed.

The next day she doled out the pennies from her tips the night before to the Armenian janitor’s son, Egoyan, pronounced “Eddy,” and he and Jack went to the movies, mostly silent films with written dialogue. They sat through the program two or three times, after which Jack reenacted every piece of action, improvising dialogue, as he did for the rest of his life.

One Friday night, Joe Bloom, visibly excited, had no patience for either chess or horse-racing news. He helped Manya serve the men, clear the dishes, and wash and clean the disorderly kitchen, the sooner to rush her and Jack out of the gaming room. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Is it a present?”

“It’s the best I can give you. Tomorrow, I’ll pick up Jack first, then we’ll come to the bakery where I’ll show you the surprise. Let Greenspan clean up the mess for once.”

“If I don’t clean up, he’ll fire me.”

“No, you’ll fire him.”

Joe ran off without his good-night kiss.

Too tired to speculate on her friend’s behavior, Manya gathered her two charges and sank into bed with her clothes on.

True to his word, Joe called for young Jack in midmorning. The day was crisp, sunny. Bertha left with Mrs. Molka for Saturday morning services at the shul, located in the shadows of the Second Avenue El. There the men prayed in the rows of long, backless wooden benches in the front and the women huddled in the rear. Shul held no delight for Bertha. She did enjoy the other little girls, who explained “Gayn pishen” to their mothers but actually never entered the smelly, dilapidated toilet. Instead, they collected at the back, whispered and talked, showed off their Shabbas dresses, a change from their everyday outfits, and didn’t return to their seats until the rebbe intoned the Sabbath blessing at noon. Bertha enjoyed the sociability; this was her one contact with girls her own age. Too busy to enroll her in school, Manya experienced no remorse, believing that her son was as good a teacher as any. In shul the little girls kept their voices low, spoke in a variety of languages, and in the absence of parental supervision experienced a chattering joy.

At the same hour, the basement of Greenspan’s bakery was bedlam, the last customers calling for the bubbling pots. Greenspan, the owner, never showed his face, claiming extreme piety, while Manya dealt with the voracious crowds.

Not on this day. Once the pans rested on the tables, Joe deftly bustled Manya out of there, beaming at his own cunning.

“Where are we going? Where are you taking me?”

“Not far. A few streets. You’ll see.”

Holding Jack’s left hand and Manya’s right, Joe led them to 12 Orchard Street.

The building required finishing touches: the plasterers had yet to add the decorative cornices. But it smelled of clean wood, clean plaster and clean air. They climbed up two flights of stairs, where a bulky man with smudged glasses low on his nose announced “Weinstock-the-agent” and flung open the door of the first apartment.

They stepped into the kitchen, which faced Canal Street, and stared in wonder at a new gas range, a new wooden icebox, a half-wall of new wooden cupboards. The walls were painted white. The sun, a vast orange, hung close enough in the sky to touch. The brilliant light after the frozen north of Ludlow Street, the location on one of the best-known streets in the vicinity, the water tower in the near distance, and beyond it the grid of multiple streets, evoked from Manya two words: “Gan Edan.” Garden of Eden. She believed it for the next thirty years.

Joe Bloom sat on the kitchen windowsill as mother and son inspected the front room with its coal-burning heater. One tiny bedroom faced Canal; the second bedroom looked out on Orchard Street, where no pushcarts were permitted.

“It’s yours, Manya, so you can open a restaurant right here, and be your own boss and not be exploited by Greenspan and Tyvil. It’s my gift to you.”

“What are you saying? What are you telling me?”

Joe burst into tears, shaking uncontrollably.

“He paid the first month’s rent,” explained Weinstock-the-agent. “Ten dollars a month for 12 Orchard Street, for your new restaurant.”

“Ten dollars a month? Every month? How will I pay it? How will I start a restaurant?”

Weinstock shrugged.

“Why is he crying?”

Regaining control, Joe Bloom replied, “I quit my job at the
Forward
yesterday. I’m moving far away.”

“Where’s far? The Bronx?” Weinstock demanded.

“No. Chicago.”

“Chicago?” Manya leaned against the not-yet-installed double washtubs. “What’s in Chicago?”

“My brother, the one who fixes watches. He’s married to a lovely girl, Miriam Rosen. She has a sister, Ruchela, Rachel. I’m marrying her. Two brothers to two sisters. An apartment upstairs with the business downstairs.”

He held up his dye-stained fingers. “Do you think these hands can fix watches like Spinoza?” Stumbling, eyes brimming with tears, he tackled the new steps two at a time and was gone.

“It’s ba-shert,” Weinstock said, nodding. “How do you say that in English?”

“Meant to be,” answered precocious Jack.

The following day Manya took leave of Tyvil. Everyone said he was an evil omen. Without his talented cook business faltered. One night, the place went up in flames. Rumors circulated that Tyvil himself set the store on fire in a drunken rage. Or that one of his wives or one of his mistresses did it. Or that the Orthodox community, in a fit of religious anger, hired a
Shabbas goy,
a non-Jew, to destroy the sinful Tyvil. Poking amid the rubble, Tyvil fell and broke his leg, and then, with his wives, mistresses and his secret recipe for gut-wrenching booze, he moved away.

Simultaneously, while the gossip swirled around Manya—that she had worked for a gangster, a mobster, a thief and a bigamist—she had a visit from the Lipinskis, distant cousins from Odessa, who were childless. Husband and wife looked like brother and sister, short, dark-haired, bereaved because they were barren. They sat on two of Manya’s mismatched chairs, cried into their spotless handkerchiefs, and begged to have Bertha live with them.

Gittel, the wife, gulping her sentences as she wept, offered to walk Bertha to and from school—she tactfully avoided the fact that Manya hadn’t bothered to register the child as yet—to feed her the best food, to buy her seven dresses, one for each day of the week, and since Duved, the husband, sold beauty supplies wholesale, Bertha could have her hair washed and set every week in their steam-heated four-room apartment in the Bronx.

Manya listened carefully, sighed and gave her answer.

“It’s not up to me, it’s for Bertha to decide. This is not Russia where Jews couldn’t walk the streets, learn and study with Russians, weren’t Russians by law, suffered from the Cossacks. They thought each one of us was an anarchist, we didn’t deserve to live. No one asked what we thought or believed. But here, a child can answer for herself. You have to ask Bertha what she wants.” Manya delivered this speech in rapidfire Yiddish, not pausing for breath.

Gittel twisted her handkerchief. “We heard you were very educated.”

Disregarding the compliment, Manya addressed her young sister. “Bertha, they will love you and you wouldn’t be living in the streets, sleeping with neighbors. We have this beautiful new apartment, but I’m opening a restaurant here. How I’ll do it, I don’t know; maybe I still have to work at the bakery. The Lipinskis, they’ll give you a different life.” Manya was close to tears.

Jack leaned over and whispered into Bertha’s ear. He talked and talked. Bertha listened and nodded. Finally she looked up. “I’ll go live in the Bronx, but only if I can come here every Friday night and stay to Sunday night.”

They kept this arrangement until Bertha married. Manya made the wedding, held at 12 Orchard Street.

Manya, my grandmother, my Bubby, and her adored son, Jack, my father, left Ludlow Street and moved into the Orchard Street apartment facing Canal Street, and there she started her private restaurant, serving five-course meals from 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. It was called dinner then, the largest meal of the day. My grandmother’s dinners soon became the rage with local merchants and others who frequented the Lower East Side.

Though still in short pants, Jack had the wisdom to suggest that the front room could be enlarged by tearing down the wall between it and the tiny bedroom above Canal Street. He also insisted that the front room would be better off without the coal stove and its ugly tin flue. “A coal stove,” he told his mother, “is for greenhorns.”

“How will we keep ourselves warm if we tear it out? The only thing left would be the kitchen range.”

He bested her with one sentence: “Don’t you know that coal dust gives you black lung disease?” He triumphed. Her young husband had contracted tuberculosis during the six-week journey in steerage from Odessa, Russia, to Ellis Island in New York. He died when he was twenty, leaving my six-month-old father half an orphan and my grandmother a widow. Nothing frightened Manya more than the prospect of losing her only child to a lung illness. Mother and son developed a phobia on the subject of lung problems.

My own early recollections of my father were of him shaking down the thermometer, inserting it under his tongue and then pacing on the Persian rug until certain that his temperature had registered. One degree higher than normal did not alarm them. But should it rise to a hundred, he was rushed into bed with a mustard plaster on his chest, which Bubby prepared with dry mustard and vinegar, placed in a brown paper bag, and covered with an old towel. If that failed, she sent for the barber, who arrived with a set of glass bulbs with narrow mouths that he heated with a small torch and arranged on my father’s chest. The cupping brought the blood to the surface of the skin, creating circles as round and symmetrical as red checkers.

Even as a young child my father recognized his mother’s anxiety about his health, and he played it like a wild card whenever he wanted something that she temporarily resisted. Getting rid of the coal stove had been a walk in the park for a player as adroit as little Jack Roth. Having the wall pulled down between two rooms required greater finesse and more ingenuity. It took him a week or more to come up with a plan.

“Weinstock-the-agent who collects the rent, he’ll do it for you,” Jack announced. “He likes you and your free meals. Say you’ll pay for the cost, for the workers, but he can’t tell the landlord, who won’t like the idea. Work on Weinstock. Don’t take no for an answer. He’ll do it for you.” Jack paused over the chicken fricassee—chicken and tiny meatballs cooked together, flavored with paprika and a dash of cinnamon, a sprinkle of sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatoes. “But he can’t give you any kisses for doing you this favor.”

Jack guarded his mother jealously, happy that they didn’t hear again from Joe Bloom after he moved to Chicago. He hated every one of her suitors, every male visitor who dropped in for a glass of slivovitz that she prepared in a storage closet in the back of the building. Most of these men were Odessaniks, who had not known Manya in the old country but were sent to her via the constant chain of gossip within the ghetto.

What my Bubby served her customers on any given day quickly reverberated around the entire quarter. All of her purveyors—Kufflick the butter-and-egg man, Saperstein from the appetizer store, Pollack in the bakery—shared the knowledge of Manya’s kitchen. Newly arrived youths still with sidelocks and scraggly beards dropped into our restaurant. She confessed that disuse had made the Russian language remote to her, and to account for the steady stream of visitors, she explained that if it weren’t for them, her Russian would have long been forgotten. Yet they rarely conversed in Russian, only Yiddish. Her son regarded each man as a potential threat, including the shabbiest in their shiny jackets and worn-out cuffs, or boys hardly older than he was. Although he concocted the scheme about Weinstock, he realized there might be a calculated risk, in terms of a flirtation with his mother.

Weinstock-the-agent—few men seemed to own a first name— huffed and sweated his way up the two flights of stairs to the restaurant to collect the monthly rent and of course his free meal. He was notorious for dumping the various dishes together. Chopped liver, gefilte fish, tongue in sweet-and-sour sauce, cold salmon in hollandaise, all went right into his soup bowl.

Simultaneously he would cut up the side dishes—sweetened cucumbers in vinegar, beets decorated with slices of hard-boiled eggs, my grandmother’s own cured sauerkraut—and place them in the kasha (groats) or in the mashed or roasted potatoes, along with his chicken or brisket of beef, with whatever broth was left in his soup bowl. Shrugging his thick shoulders, he would explain, “It goes in the same place, and I like the surprise of finding something new in my plate every minute.”

Some of the diners refused to have their meals in the same room as Weinstock, so he found himself banished to the kitchen. Far from feeling insulted, he shivered with delight. If he ate at the kitchen table, he could grab still more food from the trays and pots that covered every surface. Eating sent his moist steel-rimmed glasses sliding to the end of his bulbous nose.

My grandmother overlooked his boorish manners not because he brought in demolition workers to remove the wall between the bedroom and living room without telling the landlord, but because she was indulgent toward all males. Even someone as crude as Weinstock elicited her compassion. “Just think of his poor wife,” she said, laughing, “having to live with such a bulvan.”